Local Author: Huda Al-Marashi

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Program Type:

Featured, Literature

Age Group:

Adults, Older Adults
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Program Description

Event Details

First Comes Marriage is an Iraqi-American memoir about immigration, marriage, and love. When Huda meets Hadi, the boy she will ultimately marry, she is six years old. Both are the American-born children of Iraqi immigrants, who grew up on opposite ends of California. Hadi considers Huda his childhood sweetheart, the first and only girl he's ever loved, but Huda wants to be successful by both cultures’ relationship standards--to honor her religious traditions while also experiencing the kind of love story that would prove to her American friends her marriage was not arranged. First Comes Marriage is Huda's journey to reconcile her culture's pragmatic ideas on marriage with Western notions of love and romance. And, with its tender and heartwarming portrayal of an Arab, Muslim family, it debunks stereotypes while challenging our ideas of what it means to fall in love.

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Huda Al-Marashi is the Iraqi-American author of First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story, a book the Washington Post called "a charming, funny, heartbreaking memoir of faith, family, and the journey to love. If Jane Austen had grown up as a first-gen daughter of Iraqi parents in the 1990s, she might have written this.” Excerpts from this memoir have also been anthologized in Love Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of Muslim American Women, Becoming: What Makes a Woman, and Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women and Extreme Religion. Her other writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the LA Times, al Jazeera, VIDA Review, Refinery 29, the Rumpus, the Offing and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Cuyahoga County Creative Workforce Fellowship and an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writer Fellowship.

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The Library Shop will be onsite to sell copies of First Comes Marriage to support the San Diego Public Library Foundation.

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Need disability-related modifications or accommodations? Information and program content can be made available in alternative formats upon request by emailing JFRogers@sandiego.gov.